Michigan State is a huge university. The laboratories for my research were in two different buildings and they were about a mile apart. When the weather was nice, I would skateboard. One building was in the clinical center, where a lot of the doctors’ offices were, and the other building was the Department of Physiology, where traditional research labs could be found. Traditional laboratories are labs that have beakers, tubes, chemicals, and colored solutions, and sometimes where experiments are done with animals. I worked in both types of laboratories; a traditional lab and the dry lab in the clinical center. The dry lab was where the big Nuclear Magnetic Resonance machine would do analysis of samples. I would prepare my samples in the Physiology lab and analyze them in the NMR lab.

I felt very comfortable in the Physiology lab because this is how I was trained in chemistry and doing research. The people there, technicians, support staff, and administrators, became familiar friends and colleagues. As a graduate student I developed a network of friends and colleagues to talk to and to get ideas from as well as assistance with my work when needed. The old saying that it takes a village to raise a child is true in the mentoring system of obtaining a Ph.D. in that it takes a whole department of faculty, students and staff to ‘raise’ that student to become a Doctor of Philosophy. Dr. Dillon, for example, was my teacher and mentor and trained me to do vascular smooth muscle research.

I also felt very much at home in the clinical center. I worked with the Family Practice and the Radiology people. With my experience on the ambulance, in emergency departments, and as an athletic trainer I was able to connect with them and got to know a lot of the physicians and staff quite well.

My research required a lot of organization and logistics because I needed to collect tissue samples from the slaughterhouse, make the experimental solutions, and then get time on the NMR to do the experiments. I befriended one of the assistants in the Radiology Department. Her name was Ann Murphy. She was blonde haired, blue eyed and quite attractive. She was about the age of my little sister; about 3.5 years younger than me. I often needed to talk to her about scheduling time on the NMR machine, organizing research meetings and other research related issues and we seemed to have a connection. She was recently divorced and we flirted pretty openly. While I was probably imagining it, she seemed sincerely interested in the research I was doing and how I was making up new programs on the NMR. She even pretended to be interested in my previous work as an Athletic Trainer and on the ambulance. I was quickly becoming interested in her. She was born and raised locally. She had a brother who was a faculty member on campus and her family still lived in the house she grew up in.

Finally, our banter and flirting needed to take a next step. I asked her on a date. I told her that I had an experiment on the NMR that was to start at 5:00 P.M. on a Thursday evening and that I had tickets to the local comedy club that evening. I invited her to dinner and the show and she said yes. So my advanced computer programming was letting me do an experiment while out on a date. When Thursday came, I had everything all set up to go and got the experiment running in record time. I went to her desk to pick up Ann and she was not there. Her colleague Jean was there and told me Ann would be back in a second.

When Ann walked down the hall she looked gorgeous. Her long blonde hair flowed gently about her shoulders and in the air as she walked and her blue and pink floral print dress accentuated her feminine form. She smiled brightly when she saw me and I think I was too struck by her beauty to smile back. I had seen her at work hundreds of times sitting at her desk and passing in the hall, but I had never really looked at her and it was like I was seeing her for the first time.

Out of some kind of nervous habit, I looked at my watch.

“Are we late?” she asked.

“No, I just wanted to see what time it is. We have tons of time.” I said in a meek and halting voice.

Ann got her stuff and we walked out with a wave to Jean, who had a big smile on her face.